The account goes on to explain how the creation of one single merged Penguin Classics library in 1986 replaced the original English Library with "new versions with up-to-date critical apparatus and freshly and accurately edited texts", versions which are presumably considered accessible and welcoming to a range of readers, yet also critically "modern".

In a recent Sunday Telegraph review of these developments, however, David Sexton attacks these versions as "abominable, amounting to little less than a betrayal of the first principles of the list". He cites as evidence the difference between Trevor Blount's 1966 edition of David Copperfield and Jeremy Tambling's 1996 one, the former representing a humanitarian and enthusiastic, if somewhat unprofessional-seeming, approach to the novel, the latter annihilating all the book's imaginative vitality with jargon-ridden contemporary critical platitudes and "stupidities". This article, of course, says as much about its author's conservatism as about the editorial shifts which it purports to discuss (and it makes no attempt to examine the critical apparatus), and changes in Dickens criticism may not be applicable to Gaskell. But in considering the ways in which Gaskell herself has been served by the recent Penguin Classics editions of her works, it may be useful similarly to compare the 'old' and the 'new' version of one of her most widely-read novels, Mary Barton, as a representative example.

Stephen Gill's 1970 edition, as well as the usual critical apparatus of Bibliography, Note on the Text, brief information about the author, and the Notes themselves (scholarly and informative, especially on the socio-historical background), contains two appendices, one on the outline plan for the novel and the other reproducing a poem by Gaskell and her husband, plus a twenty-page introduction. This last focuses on Gaskell mainly from a socio-historical perspective, contextualising her novel with reference to writers such as Carlyle, Disraeli and Dickens, and discussing her "realism", especially her "fidelity to feelings". Though it attempts to consider the weaknesses of the work as an example of "social purpose" fiction, it offers little revisionary critical insight and is unannotated. In contrast, Macdonald Daly's 1996 edition, as well as containing a full explanatory Note on the Text and very detailed and well-referenced notes relaying much socio-historical information (there is, however, no mention of Angus Easson's recent Ryburn edition, which is strange), offers a provocative and sometimes aggressive introduction which makes few concessions to a 'general' reader. It does not engage exclusively (or excludingly) with highly theorised contemporary critical discourse - the occasional use of terminology such as "deconstruct", "overdetermined" or "interpellates" is not problematic. But it is a very patently ideologically constructed critique, which not only takes up a politically challenging approach to the novel but also sometimes skews its textual readings to that end. Building on the insightful Marxist tradition of critics such as Raymond Williams and John Lucas (neither of whom is actually mentioned), it flavours its often perceptive commentary with an infuriatingly self-righteous tone towards both Gaskell and her assumed readership today: she is accused of complicity with the very values she appears to be deconstructing - a strategy of neutralisation which Daly calls a "programme of the capitalist-oriented bourgeois intelligentsia" and which, he suggests, may account for "why [the novel] remains a staple element of English Literature syllabuses a century and a half later"(xix). Smug jibes like this are compounded by obviously biased judgments. Gaskell's mediating authorial interpolations are dismissed as "trite, typically pious discourse" (xiii), while the fact that many of her readers would have been women, able to take no more subversive and radical action than to implement the Christian charity which she recommends - and of which Daly is so contemptuous - is ignored. For all this, the introduction is stimulating and carefully researched (it makes much useful reference to Engels, for instance), and no reader of it will be able subsequently to approach the novel with indifference. The pity is, really, that Daly seems to take so little pleasure in his chosen text.

It would be wrong to suggest that such a strongly personalised approach is characteristic of all the new Penguins. Other editors either present a less penetratingly argued thesis - like Patricia Ingham whose treatment of North and South neither works well as a general entry into the work nor adequately substantiates its over-easy conflation of class and gender and its extravagant feminist claims (Margaret Hale, for instance, is turned into a belligerent agitator, whose "desire for power" and "relentless determination" to have her own way allow her to submit to Thornton only "when she has reduced him to a state in which she can, through her collaborator, Higgins, control his actions as an employer"); or intelligently implement a more traditional approach - like Pam Morris, whose introduction to Wives and Daughters admirably combines background information with a perceptive and suggestive discussion of the novel as both a feminist and imperialist text.

Overall, it is perhaps tempting to argue that Penguin offers the most scholarly and revisionist editions of Gaskell, but this would be to devalue the others. Everyman has made a very creditable inroad into the Gaskell paperback market with its new and annotated editions which are gradually replacing the old Everymans, texts which though containing brief introductions were unedited. There are four currently available works: Mary Barton, edited by Alan Shelston; North and South, edited by Jenny Uglow, with notes by Graham Handley; The Life of Charlotte Brontë, with an introducton by Jenny Uglow and other critical apparatus by Graham Handley; and Cranford and Mr Harrison's Confessions, edited by Graham Handley. Basically these follow the usual editorial patterns, with the additions outlined above. Also specific to Everyman is the section on "Elizabeth Gaskell and her Critics" which summarises reviews of each work from its first appearance up to the present day. This has the value of foregrounding pioneering studies which have introduced new directions in Gaskell criticism. Alan Shelston's account of Mary Barton is particularly useful in this respect, noting as it does the importance of Marxist-oriented approaches such as Raymond Williams's and John Lucas's, and the inauguration of feminist criticism of Gaskell in the late 1980's with Patsy Stoneman's Key Women Writers volume. In some editions, however - most notably Graham Handley's pieces for Cranford and The Life of Charlotte Brontë - this becomes little more than a series of long quotations, inadequately contextualised and hence not alerting readers to overall critical trends and developments. The shorter space allotted to introductions, too (about half that of Penguins) means that points raised are often compressed; Jenny Uglow's discussion of North and South, for example, fails to explore the fascinating suggestion that the novel's excitement derives from its representation of "the sheer seductiveness of power, whether sexual or social" (xxiv).

Turning finally to the World's Classics editions, it is worth observing that this publisher still offers the only near comprehensive list of Gaskell's short stories, which are notably absent from other lists. Separate volumes include Cousin Phillis and Other Tales, A Dark Night's Work and Other Stories, The Moorland Cottage and Other Stories, and My Lady Ludlow and Other Stories. The recent remaindering of Alan Sutton's two volumes, Lois the Witch and Other Stories and The Manchester Marriage, leaves World's Classics as the sole repository of this considerable segment of Gaskell's output, except for "Mr Harrison's Confessions" in the Everyman Cranford volume. On the other hand, World's Classics seem less eager than other publishers to revise their existing editions of the major works, most of which first appeared in paperback in the early to mid 1980's (a replacement for the old pocket-sized hardback editions and complementing the Oxford Paperback series which was gradually phased out); while these are in many ways perfectly satisfactory, they are of course not up-to-date with secondary material, nor, in some cases, do their introductions engage with recent developments in crititcal theory. A new addition to the list, however, is Angus Easson's The Life of Charlotte Brontë, which, since it is based on the revised Third Edition, usefully complements the new Everyman which reproduces the First Edition. It is also to be assumed that other re-issues are in the pipeline, since certainly one other text, North and South, is currently being prepared for publication.

These editions tend to fall between Penguin and Everyman in their overall level of approach; their notes are on the whole more extensive and more scholarly than those of Everyman editions, but their introductions are similarly shorter than Penguin's and hence unable to offer such a detailed analysis of each work. Some of these introductions, too, as has already been suggested, tend to be intellectually somewhat cautious, offering historical and background information, rather than challenging new readings, and relying on traditional evaluations of Gaskell's "deeply-felt moral convictions" and her ability to make "us" feel the "real" world. Easson's 1987 introduction to Wives and Daughters well illustrates this tendency: in an edition which is eminently scholarly and very carefully researched, it offers an unprobing and cosy discussion of the novel which treats character as a known quantity rather than a fictional construct, and in its examination fails to take account of wider questions of identity, sexuality and gender roles, and narrative strategies. But then, if the overall aim is to attract readers to Gaskell, they must not be presented with an intellectually alien and hostile critical viewpoint; this danger has already been seen in Daly's editorial work, as well as in Sexton's assessment of Tambling's miscalculation of his audience.

So, the delights of Gaskell, already well known to her afficianados, are, one hopes, now reaching an ever-widening public, and all the publishers concerned are to be congratulated on their enterprise, even if their prime motivation is commercial. No doubt the next step will be TV and film adaptations of her work - and then who knows how many new editions will appear?